History of Mathematics

Generally speaking, if \(a \times b = c\), then \(a\) and \(b\) are factors of \(c\). This concept appears at the secondary level in two contexts: The factors of positive integers, and the factors of a polynomial. If we limit…Read more

I’m currently reading Howard Eves’s Great Moments in Mathematics After 1650 (1983, Mathematical Association of America), a chronological collection of lectures. The first lecture in this volume (the second of two) is on the development of probability as a formal field of…Read more

Contemporary plane geometry of the sort taught in the standard American high school is most heavily informed by two books and a third mathematician. The first of these is Euclid’s Elements, which is so conceptually tied to planar geometry that…Read more

I have borrowed from a colleague a copy of G. A. Wentworth’s Plane and Solid Geometry, copyright 1899 and published 1902 by The Athenæum Press of Boston. I enjoy reading old textbooks because they either reinforce or give lie to certain…Read more

The version of Geometry most widely taught in high schools in the United States is an amalgam of the two most basic fields of geometry: Synthetic and analytic. The mixing of these two is done in such a way as…Read more

In my previous post, I looked at the first two detailed examples provided by al-Khowarizmi in his compendium, the title of which gives us the word “algebra”. Al-Khowarizmi discussed three types of mathematical objects: Numbers (N, constants), roots (R, unknowns),…Read more

The word “algebra” comes to us from the title of a book, Hidab al-jabr wal-muqubala written by Abu Abdallah Mohammed ben Musa al-Khowarizmi (there are variations in the transliterations of both the title and the author) around AD 825. He was…Read more